Seeds of Diaspora - Incite at Columbia University

Active Project

Seeds of Diaspora

Part of the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference, Seeds of Diaspora convenes an interdisciplinary working group of academics and practitioners.

This group is selecting a short list of non-cultivated plants found in New York City, and considering how they each embody native and non-native landscape imaginaries. The group will link each plant and its botanical descriptors to maps, images, practices, and texts that communicate ecological, herbalist, culinary, agricultural, literary, artistic, anthropological, and other cultural traditions.

Three people sitting in front of two blue buckets outdoors.
Working group members at Truelove Seeds Farm, Glen Mills, Pennsylvania.

In an era of fraught nationalism, mass migration and climate change, and as the boundaries between ecosystems and society are constantly reconfigured, the group will emphasize the potential of plants to connect and to describe cultural landscapes past, present, and future.

Related Projects

  • go to Recovery
    Recovery
    Navigating the concept of recovery in social and political life through fields of governance, biomedicine, climate change, and economics.
  • go to Motherhood and Technology
    Motherhood and Technology
    Exploring technological innovations that have radically transformed the biological and social experience of motherhood in recent decades.
  • go to Afro-Nordic Feminisms
    Afro-Nordic Feminisms
    Establishing a space for Afro-Nordic scholarship, identity, culture, social movements, and social justice organizing.
  • go to Alternative Modes of Being
    Alternative Modes of Being
    Bringing premodern knowledge traditions from Asia and Africa into dialogue with scholars focused on crises of capitalism, colonialism, and climate chaos.